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Intel: Powering the Networks of the Future

By Sandra Rivera, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Network Platforms Group, Intel

AT&T reports its network traffic grew 250,000 percent over the last decade. (Yes, there are four zeros there.) And the company expects mobile data to grow another ten-fold in the next five years. It’s a sign of the digital era wherein people are increasingly mobile and connected and “things” are the next big wave of Internet users. Communications service providers (CoSPs) are already dealing with these challenges. So I’d like to tell you why our announcement of the Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform (codename Purley), the network transformation enablers we’re providing with it, and the work we’re doing with AT&T and other service providers are key to the transformation needed to provide networks ready for today and the future.

The challenges go beyond exploding capacity needs. The network of the future—and 5G wireless is in the very near future—must provide flexibility and agility to enable service providers to develop and deploy new services rapidly. We must be able to tune network “slices” to specific workloads. And we must be able to quickly reconfigure and redeploy services and capacity in response to user demand. This requires a transformation from a network made up of fixed-function network devices to a programmable network of software-based virtual network functions (VNFs) running on industry-standard servers and enabled by open source software.

The Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform is a completely re-architected CPU and chipset designed specifically to execute these kinds of virtualized workloads. With up to four processors and 28 cores per processor, it’s supporting 4.2x the number of virtual machines and achieving throughput over 4x greater for these workloads than previous generations. And it will let service providers deploy intelligence across the network to create a uniform fabric that can scale performance from small systems at the edge to large data centers computing engines.

For communications applications, commanding performance in virtualized environments is just the starting point. Intel® QuickAssist Technology provides hardware acceleration for compute-intensive network functions like data compression and encryption that will help make the new networks faster and more secure. And the SNAP and Collectd open telemetry frameworks provide a real-time view of infrastructure capabilities, utilization, and events to enable infrastructure and service monitoring and automation.

To help service providers speed the transformation of their networks, we also recently announced the availability of the Intel® Select Solution Fast Track Kit for Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI). These reference architectures provide developers fast access to advanced configurations and eliminate the complexity of low-level tuning and configuration. The resulting integrated and tested hardware platforms are tuned to the needs of NFVI and will accelerate the transformation all CoSPs face.

AT&T began the network transformation journey three years ago. We’ve been collaborating on our 5G roadmaps and exploring new use cases made possible by bringing more computing power to the network edge. They set a goal to virtualize and software control 75 percent of their network infrastructure by 2020, and working with Intel, they’re on track to reach the 50 percent mark this year. With this new platform, AT&T will reduce time to market for new services from months to weeks or even days.

Deploying virtual network functions on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform—a powerful, uniform hardware infrastructure tuned to network functions virtualization—speeds the network transformation in front of us all. It provides a standard platform to reduce acquisition and operations costs and allow services to be deployed anywhere needed. It enables the automation to provide instant response to user demand. And this new intelligent infrastructure lets service providers bring to market a new generation of applications that incorporate analytics and artificial intelligence to enable virtual and augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, and other applications that can positively change the way people live and work.

Learn more about how Intel ® technology—including the Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform—is helping usher in the networks of the future.